The Crying of Lot 49

Upon reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, there is a sense that Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of the novel, is treading the path walked earlier in literature by Alice, in Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland. Oedipa, like Alice, is cast head-long into a meta-real world within which she must not only survive but also make sense of, in order to survive.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Oedipa's attempts to make sense of a fragmented and fragmenting world, by trying to construct a metanarrative -- a task that is perpetually impossible. Jean-Frantois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition will provide the theoretical basis of our inquiry. To arrive at a Lyotardian reading of Pynchon's novel, we will concentrate on the themes of entropy and the self. As well, we shall read the Lyotardian themes of knowledge, communication and power by way of Pynchon.

When Oedipa embarks on her journey for San Narciso, she hopes to build a metanarrative about her ex-boyfriend, the late Pierce Inverarity (aside from going to serve as the executor of his will). What she confronts is entropy, mirrored in Maxwell's Demon that Nefastis has created -- a machine that seeks to preserve a world that is able to remain heterogeneous. However, San Narciso is not heterogeneous; it is a place filled with incommensurable stories -- narratives forever free-floating: "Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be l

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dipa's quest). What we are left with is open multiplicity, incommensurable language-games, each disposing its own immanent criteria (Cf. the many people and the stories of their loves that Oedipa contacts). The result will be that the State and the superiority of scientific knowledge (as metanarratives) will break down (Cf. Oedipa's erratic attempts to piece together the puzzle of WASTE). It may also mean the disintegration of the social bond (entropy) because people will come to understand that their stories are merely just one among many other stories (Cf. the men in Oedipa's life, and as a result her own life). Furthermore, social entropy can stagnate a society, if there is no move to re-establish a power balance that encourages social movement (such as Loren Passerine and the final "auction", which will bring about a new balance and social movement). But what is this move? This move is inscribed in a language-game. In language-games (be they gestures, patterns, stories, word-sample correlations), knowledge comes to rest with the individual in nodal points (posts). Its communication takes place in complex and mobile circuits to form a discourse. The rules of language-games are devised by explicit and inexplicit contracts bet

Category: Literature - T